Wedding #4: Juliane & Eugen

Finally last Friday, the last German Bundesländer started into school holidays. A perfect day to test the parking capacity on the autobahn as you could not really speak of driving with all the stop-and-go and traffic jams.

We headed northwest to my cousins Juliane's wedding. Late evening, we arrived at the Hotel am Schloss (at the castle) in Alzey where we met some other relatives who came earlier from Leipzig.

Saturday after breakfast, we strolled around the old town of Alzey that featured some nice old buildings with metal guild marks.

Later we drove through the nearby wineyards and stopped at a winery www.weingut-stelzer.de. There we tasted wine and later filled the trunk with several bottles.

Then we went back to the hotel for lunch and change of dress and in the early afternoon we headed to the village of Bermersheim vor der Höhe where Juliane and Eugen got married in the church.

The party with all my aunts, uncles, cousins and six grand cousins and many more took place at the hotel. The food was delicious, the cakes awesome and the wine great.

The next morning we enjoyed all another breakfast together with the remaining cake before we left for home. But the next wedding is just three weeks away.

B2Run in the Olympic Parc in Munich

After several months of preparation, a new pair of Nike shoes and many training runs - the Business2Run started thursday evening in the Olympia Parc in Munich. More than 30,000 people started the 6.1 km race around the parc with the finish in the Olympic Stadion.

before the start

our shirts - Team Running MAN

all six people of our department made it to finish

a medal for every finisher

Long weekend on the road

It was a long weekend starting on Friday morning with a drive to the ADAC Safety Training Centre in Augsburg. There I took part in a safety training for commercial vehicles to renew my licence in two years. We did drive tractor, truck, tipper with and without safety assistants.

We practiced emergency braking on different road surfaces (with aqua planing), dodging obstacles and driving on slippery slopes.

After the training I drove to Leipzig for Inka's birthday party on saturday evening. Sunday noon I hit the road again in direction of Frankfurt/ Main and the FIFA Female Soccer Championship Final.

My seat in the stadion was in a corner with good view of one of the goals. Both US Americans and Japanese made it a thrilling match.

There were many fans for the US team, and a lot for the team from Japan. Loyalties with the German fans changed - first they cheered for USA, after the first goal they encouraged the Japanese. After 90 minutes the match was drawn, so we went into extra time.

Cheers again for USA - they goaled. Loyalties changed again and Japan thanked with the fans by another goal. So after 120 minutes, I found that I had a real good viewing position (see photo) for the penalty shoout-out.

The Japanese keeper performed very well and stopped three balls of the US Americans which made them the champion!

After the match, I met up some more friends from Munich who also got tickets for final.

Early monday morning, I drove back to Munich directly to work where I reached just before noon because of some bad trafic jams.

International Bus Sales Conference

Last week we had at the International Bus Sales Conference at MAN Truck & Bus Forum hosting 320 delegates from 38 nations.

During the 3 days, we had the possibility to see all the new products like our Hybrid bus and the new Skyliner. With the later one we did a test drive on the motorway.

Neoplan Skyliner

Lion's City Hybrid

One of the evenings, we had Joey Kelly from The Kelly Family as motivational speaker about passion - he's kind of crazy guy taking part in marathons, ultratons, desert runs and so on.

It was great to see what you can achieve with enough passion. I even got my first Kelly CD, a picture and an autograph:-).